


Contratto

by cthulhuraejepsen



Category: Original Work
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-07
Updated: 2016-06-07
Packaged: 2018-07-12 23:13:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 15,133
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7127255
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cthulhuraejepsen/pseuds/cthulhuraejepsen





	Contratto

Chicago, 1946

The diner was brightly lit, which only made Julia’s interviewer look all the more pale. The steel-skinned diner was a small place, the size of a train car, where you could get greasy eggs and burnt-black coffee at any hour of the day. The incandescent lights reflected off laminated tables and illuminated the thin fabric of the booths. Julia had ordered bacon and hash browns while she was waiting, half of which was left uneaten; she had a bad case of nerves. Her interviewer had ordered a coffee when he’d arrived, but he hadn’t touched it since then. The fat on her bacon had gone cold and white while they talked.

It seemed like he’d asked everything there was to ask about her. She’d told him about her childhood in Virginia, about her work in the Office of War Information, and about her current pursuits in the world of marketing. If he’d been a less pleasant man, perhaps she would have pressed him to get to the point, but he listened to her with honest interest, and their conversation seemed to flow naturally from subject to subject as she prattled on. She knew practically nothing about him. He’d given the name of Ernest MacArthur, though she had an inkling that wasn’t the truth. There had to be a reason that the interview was here, at night, instead of in an office. He spoke with a slight, barely detectable accent that she couldn’t place. Eventually his questions came more slowly, until Julia found herself sitting with him in silence, the spell broken.

“You’re wondering about the offer?” asked MacArthur with a gentle smile.

“It’s for the government, isn’t it?” asked Julia. “Hence the secrecy.” The diner was nearly empty, and it was quite late. The interview hadn’t started until just after sundown.

“Not quite government,” said MacArthur. “The job is unconventional and will require a heavy commitment on your part. It’s marketing, in a sense, but also propaganda in another sense. We need someone to muddy the waters for us, in such a way that no one realizes that the waters are being muddied. We wouldn’t be suited by ridiculous posters of asiatic men with yellow skin and buck teeth, do you understand? None of what the OWI did. We need a snake in the grass, not a roaring lion.”

“You want to be deceptive?” asked Julia. “But you still haven’t told me what you’d hope to accomplish with that deception.”

“I’m afraid I’ll have to beat around the bush a little more than that,” said MacArthur. His smile had faded somewhat. “It’s not something that I can say all at once, not if I want you to take me seriously.”

“If you’re some sort of crank,” Julia began, but she didn’t quite know how to finish that sentence. “Then I don’t think I’ll be taking the job, whatever it is.”

MacArthur reached into his coat pocket and pulled out a slender piece of dark, shiny yellow metal the size of a finger. He slid it across the table to her. The color had clued her in, but she didn’t really believe it until she felt how heavy it was. It was a piece of gold, irregular in shape but polished to a gleam. “If I’m a crank,” said MacArthur, “then you can be assured that I’m a wealthy one. That’s yours, payment for this interview if nothing else.”

Julia slipped the piece of gold into her pocket. The lean war years had weakened her instinct towards pride. She could feel bad about taking an enormous amount of unearned money sometime later, after she’d bought some groceries and paid her rent. “I’m listening.”

“I belong to an ancient and secret order,” said MacArthur. “Older than you can properly imagine, older than the mind can find context for. We are enormously wealthy, and as a consequence of that fact, we wield quite a bit of power. There is a strong need to maintain this secret, for reasons that will become clear later.” He held up a hand. “A great many sins lie in our past, but in these modern times we endeavor to break no laws.”

Julia frowned. “I’ll admit to being intrigued. You want me to help you keep your secret?”

“Yes,” nodded MacArthur. He looked down at his cold coffee and took a sip of it with a grimace. “And now, of course, you want to know what our secret is, before you’ll agree to be complicit in the sins that mark our storied history.”

“Yes,” said Julia. The nugget of gold in her pocket felt quite heavy. It was the only reason she was still sitting there. Her interviewer had all but admitted to being a criminal.

“And here we come to a conundrum,” said MacArthur. “I don’t want to tell you the secret unless you agree to keep it, and you don’t want to agree to keep it unless you know what it is first. Well, no matter. A clandestine meeting that our mostly absent waitress will only half remember, paired with a truth that has no evidence to back it up? My order has allowed me to let you in on this much, knowing that you would have no one to present it to.” He clapped his hands together and leaned forward, staring into her eyes as though about to pray to her. “I belong to a society of immortals.”

Julia lowered her eyes to the table, but kept from frowning. Not a criminal, but a crank, even if he was rich. “It raises questions,” she said.

“It certainly does,” said MacArthur. The smile had returned to his face. “Ask away then, and I can answer.”

“Why keep it secret?” asked Julia.

“Ah, well, immortality is a strong word. It would perhaps be better to say that we are undying, though that might also give the wrong impression. Let me rephrase again and say that we are impervious to a large number of the ways in which men kill each other. If left to our own devices, we would not naturally die. The oldest of us has seen three millennia. Yet we can be killed, if intellect and effort are applied to the matter. If our secret came out, there would be those who would try their best to end us, and so we keep our existence known to as few as possible.”

“Ah,” said Julia. “And how do you come by this immortality?”

MacArthur looked down and swirled his coffee in his cup. “We drink blood.”

Julia stared at him. “What, like Bela Lugosi? A vampire?”

“Yes,” replied MacArthur.

A small trickle of fear ran through Julia for the first time. She didn’t believe that he was a vampire or an immortal, but it was certainly possible that he -- and others -- had a secret cult which drank blood. She imagined them in hooded robes. Julia looked around the diner. There weren’t many people there, but the cook was the type of large, burly man who might come to her defense if she screamed. She wasn’t in any real danger as yet. She had time to ask questions.

“Where does the blood come from?” she asked.

“We pay people for it,” said MacArthur, as though they were discussing the weather. “Blood transfusion has been a boon to our kind, a useful cover for our appetites. Diverting large quantities of blood is a problem, but one that we believe we have solved to our satisfaction. The most morally questionable thing that we do is to buy blood under false pretenses. Nevertheless, a person can safely sell a pint of their blood every two months, depending on a few factors. They walk away with a handful of dollars in their pocket and are no worse for it. Both parties are better for the transaction, as all trade should be.”

“And you drink this blood?” asked Julia. Her hand reached down beneath the table and touched the lump of gold in her pocket, just to make sure that it was still there. At least she would get something from this meeting.

“We require one pint every day,” said MacArthur. “We have a craving for it, but the taste itself is not terribly pleasant. I rinse my mouth out afterwards. It’s one of the conditions you would have to think on before you came to join us.”

“You want me to drink blood with you?” asked Julia. The words sounded bizarre coming from her mouth.

“We would want you to become one of our kind,” said MacArthur. He leaned forward. “A vampire. You must understand that it is one of the only ways to ensure your silence.”

Julia’s hands were trembling slightly. She folded them in her lap, out of his sight. “You understand that I’m quite incredulous.” The fear was giving way to anger, and she had nearly lambasted him for wasting her time before remembering about the lump of gold sitting in her pocket. She had no idea how much the gold would be worth, or how she’d go about selling it, but it was almost certainly more money than she’d seen in one place since the war ended.

“Of course I understand the skepticism,” nodded MacArthur. “I have revealed our existence to a great many people over the years and have seen the gamut of reactions. Your own impulses are a product of the times, a tendency to believe that there is little in this world that can’t be explained given enough rational thought. We’ve split the atom, therefore the world is our oyster, yes? Well, I suppose that if you fancy yourself a scientist, I can offer you proof.”

He craned his neck to look around the diner, and Julia watched him. He had a long neck and perfectly white teeth. There was no hint of fang there; if there had been, she would have noticed it right away. His incisors weren’t even particularly long. His skin was pale, though it was nothing too unnatural. The color was something that a person could achieve simply by staying out of the sunlight. That could be part of the man’s madness. He was the one who had decided that it would be after dark when they met. It was plausible that this, too, was part of the man’s delusion.

Having determined to his satisfaction that no one was looking, MacArthur grabbed one of the thin metal spoons and crushed it between his hands. He dropped the resulting ball of metal onto the table, and slid it towards her with one finger. Julia could only stare at it.

“Do you believe this is some kind of trick?” asked MacArthur. “Or are you willing to accept that you’ve seen something that falls outside the boundaries of the world as you know it?” He gave her a gentle smile.

Julia picked up the ball of crushed metal. The silverware was cheap here, enough that she would be able to bend it with some efforts, but what MacArthur had done was something else. She could see the imprints of his fingertips. She pushed it back towards him, and he looked around once more before putting it into his coat pocket.

“I believe you,” she said. “You understand that I’ll need more than just that, but I do believe you. Explaining it is another issue altogether.” They sat in silence as he waited for her to think. “Which of the myths are true?”

MacArthur smiled, showing a distinct lack of fangs. “We burn in sunlight, though we don’t need to sleep during the day once we’ve passed the first year. We grow stronger and faster with age. Our features are not so monstrous, aside from the fangs.” MacArthur opened his mouth and tapped at his incisor with a fingernail. “Those we file down, in this day and age. In the past, we would have considered it a mutilation, but it’s a necessity if we wish to pass unnoticed. We cannot transform into creatures of the night, nor can we read minds, let alone control them. And we are invulnerable to nearly anything aside from sunlight and wooden implements. The religious aspects are nonsense, of course.”

“And you want me to … what, exactly?” asked Julia.

“As I’ve said, if we were revealed, it would cause no end of problems. We are careful, as a collective, but there are always aberrations, and history is not so devoid of clues as it should be. At the same time, we are a deeply conservative people. The endless centuries will do that to you. Your induction would be part of our effort to pull new blood into the organization, to see things as a modern person might. We need someone to respond to new threats in new ways. Your primary duty would be to ensure that we are not discovered, in whatever way you see fit. Hide us from the spotlight. Cloak us in darkness, so that we might go undisturbed by this new world. Marketing, propaganda, public relations. Whatever it takes, whatever it costs. You can understand how it might compare to your work in the Office of War Information.”

“I see,” said Julia. Her tongue touched her own teeth and felt the shape of them.

“You have our number,” said MacArthur. He slid out from the booth, then stood up and smoothed his jacket down.

“That’s it?” asked Julia. She wanted to ask what would happen if she went to the papers, but of course she knew the answer to that already. They wouldn’t believe her, since she had no proof. MacArthur was free to tell her nearly anything, given how insane it sounded. Even though she’d seen him crumple up metal like it was paper, she barely believed it. All she really had to mark that this meeting had happened was an irregular lump of gold, and that would prove little. She would check it over for identifying marks before she sold it though, just in case.

“We’re finished for now,” said MacArthur. “Your discretion is appreciated in this matter, and we look forward to hearing from you, no matter what you choose.” He nodded towards her, laid a large bill on the table to pay for his coffee and her meal, and walked out of the diner. Julia had enough experience with people to know that he was leaving her wanting more, but it was whetting her appetite all the same.

MacArthur looked from side to side after he’d left the diner, then turned back to Julia and winked at her before leaping up and out of sight.

 

* * *

 

“I’m glad you decided to join us,” said MacArthur with a wan smile.

They sat in a richly furnished apartment in Humboldt Park, just after the sun had gone down. The windows were completely blacked out, obscuring the view, but they were high enough up that this bit of interior decorating wasn’t noticeable from the street.

“I decided that I didn’t have much of a choice,” said Julia. “If I’d turned you down, I would have been left wondering for the rest of my life.”

A week of reflection had allowed her some insight into why MacArthur had chosen her. The questions he had asked her in their long interview had a point to them, once the truth had been revealed. She was nearly friendless, and she liked it that way. She had no family, as her father had died in the war and her mother had succumbed to a wasting sickness. Julia had been good at her job, but didn’t particularly like interacting with people, and she wouldn’t have to do too much of that in her new position, if only because she wouldn’t be able to go out during the daytime. That aversion to humanity was rare in advertising, but it would be an attractive feature so far as the vampires were concerned. Much of the interview must have been for show; she was certain that they had the resources and the motive to investigate her fully before they approached her.

MacArthur pulled out a weathered leather roll, which he unfurled on an end table. He patted a long chaise lounge in a way that an uncle might have. “There are two steps to the process,” said MacArthur as she sat down. He pointed to a pair of syringes that poked out from their leather encasement. “First, an anesthetic to put you to sleep, and second, the blood of a vampire. When you wake, you will be one of us.”

Julia looked at the syringes. The first was filled with a clear fluid, while the second had something that looked like liquid tar, as black as night. “Will my blood be black?” she asked.

“Yes,” said MacArthur. “Though you’ll never notice it. There is little that can make us bleed. It will be possible to pierce you with wood, but you’ll be fast enough and strong enough to prevent that from happening. Are you ready?”

“I’m … I have more questions,” she replied. “I hadn’t thought this would happen today.”

“Are these questions that I could answer while allowing you to remain human?” asked MacArthur. “Would the answers to these questions potentially dissuade you from the transformation? If the questions will not matter, or I cannot answer them, then it’s better not to ask them until after this is over. I’ve seen enough people stall to know that it’s better to simply have it done with.”

Julia swallowed once and nodded. She had planned to ask whether she would still be able to have children, but it didn’t matter what his answer was. She had no special craving for children. There were other questions about how the vampires lived and worked, but those answers could wait. If she were being honest with herself, she had been sold on it from the moment she’d seen him jump straight into the air. The power he had was real, and he was offering some of it to her. If someone offered you immortality, you had to take it, didn’t you?

“Good,” said MacArthur. He picked up the clear syringe and squeezed it slightly. She closed her eyes when the needle bit into the vein of her arm, and that was her last human memory.

 

* * *

 

Officially, she’d died in a car accident on the Chicago Turnpike. There was a brief funeral that no one attended. The charred remains were buried in a cemetery, with her name etched into a headstone. She was assured that the corpse had been ethically sourced, but she didn’t question it too deeply.

She was given a new last name. Her first name remained the same. It was somewhat like being married, in that respect. She was Julia McGraw now, instead of Julia Smith. They had paperwork ready for her, all done without any need for action on her part.

Her fangs were filed down with a piece of oak. The process was painful -- excruciating, actually. They didn’t have a sedative that would work on a vampire, so she was held down by three strong men. She crushed the first speculum they put in her mouth, bending the metal with her teeth. The dentist chided his assistant for putting it in too loosely. The second time it stretched her jaw wide open, pushing the muscles to full extension so that she couldn’t move them. The speculum was uncomfortable, and it made her eyes water, but it was nothing compared to the feeling of a file grinding down the nerve in her tooth. She cried and tried to thrash around, or beg them to stop, but the men holding her arms and legs in place were vampires too, and they were far stronger than she was. Her plaintive attempts at speech came out only as howls. The process seemed to last forever, especially at the end, when the dentist would pull back to inspect his work and then continue with a fine-grained file to round off the tooth. When she heard him say, “Alright, now for the left tooth,” and realized that it was only halfway over, she strained hard against the men pinning her down, making every muscle in her arms and legs go taut, and nearly escaped their grasp. She cried, she tried to plead with them, to gouge them, but the three men held her firmly in place while the dentist and his assistant did their work.

When it was over she dried her eyes and drank deeply from the vial of warm blood they’d given her. She needed blood, wanted it, craved it, but the taste was too much like copper and salt. She kept running her tongue over her former fangs. She’d only had them for a day, perhaps not even that, but she already missed them. There was a small groove on the back of her incisors that hadn’t been there before the transformation, along with a barely perceptible divot in her gums where that groove led, but that was it.

“It’s difficult, for some,” said MacArthur. He stepped into the recovery room she was sitting in and hung his scarf and hat on a rack beside the door. The vial of blood they’d given her was empty. She drank an entire pint without really thinking about it. Someone had brought in a mug of coffee, but she’d only cupped it in her hands and hadn’t taken so much as a sip. She had expected herself to be trembling, but her movements were smooth and fluid. She didn’t know how much time had passed, but obviously it was enough for MacArthur to have been called in. He sat down beside her and rested a hand on her back. “That’s the price of the modern age. It’s the single greatest hardship you’ll face in this life. If all goes well, you’ll never feel pain again.”

“I’m fine,” said Julia. She sniffed slightly and ran her tongue over her incisors again. The copper taste of blood still lingered in her mouth. “I wish I’d been told it would be like that. Being held down. The pain. The violation.” She twisted her lips, and stared at the door to the room. It had a frosted glass window. From time to time she could see someone walk past, their shape distorted into nearly a silhouette. The building they brought her to was out in the country, almost certainly so that no one could hear the screams. It was a facility of some sort, used for other purposes most of the time. There couldn’t possibly be enough new vampires to warrant this place if it was only for filing down fangs.

“I have one other unpleasant surprise,” said MacArthur. “I know what you’ve gone through was traumatic, but better to get the bad news all at once.”

“No,” said Julia. “If there’s some other pain, some other humiliation ...”

Yet she’d only had those fangs for a day. They’d done nothing more than restore her appearance to what it had been. She’d looked in the mirror after her transformation. Vampirism was barely noticeable. Her skin was more fair, now almost to the point where someone might remark on it, but it wasn’t deathly pale. Her hair hadn’t changed at all. Neither had her eyes. She could pass for human, now that the fangs looked just like ordinary teeth. How had she grown such an attachment to those fangs in so short a period? Every time her eyes found the mirror, she wanted to turn away again, or to smash the mirror into pieces. Vampires weren’t supposed to have reflections anyway. She found herself wishing that myth was true.

“There’s an aspect of our nature that I haven’t told you about,” said MacArthur. He held up a hand to forestall her objections. “It’s nothing that will affect you, but I would hate for you to find out on your own and think that I had tried to hide it from you.” He took a breath. “When a vampire dies, his progeny die with him.”

Julia shook her head. “You mean … if you die, I die too?”

“Something like that,” said MacArthur. “It seems like a weakness, but it’s really a strength. It unites us. As I said, nothing that need worry you, nothing that will materially affect you.”

There was a reason that he’d told her though, one that she figured out only later, when she was settling into the new apartment they’d given to her. It was nothing that would materially affect her, unless there were a war against the vampires. If the secret got out and vampires were hunted down, Julia wouldn’t just have to worry about her own safety, but the safety of the vampire that had created her, and the vampire that had created him, all the way up the chain. The OWI and OSS had both been dissolved, but she had contacts within the new Central Intelligence Agency. If she changed her mind about vampirism and went to them, the nature of an offensive war against vampires would dictate strikes against the highest of the vampires, to prune the branches of the tree of progeny. The point about unity had been made with a fair amount of subtlety, but the conclusions she was coming to were as unsubtle as they came.

The first week went quickly. Several boxes of files were delivered to her house, which ranged from newspaper clippings to thick ledgers with oiled leather covers. There had apparently been a number of times that vampiric activity had almost come to light in the past few hundred years, and these files chronicled all of them. The windows of her apartment had been blacked out, removing all sense of time, and Julia spent most of her nights trying to get the files into order while thinking about what this project would need. Every night, around an hour past sundown, a vampire would deliver a pint of blood to her in a chilled glass bottle, painted white to hide what it contained. She drank it quickly and rinsed her mouth out afterward. During the day, she would get drowsy and sleep splayed out on her bed.

She tried drinking animal blood. She’d had to go through a fair amount of trouble to buy it from a butcher, given the mildly unusual nature of the request and the fact that she could only go out at night. The taste was terrible, but the effects were worse. An unpleasant sensation in her stomach turned into a cramping pain that left her curled up on the floor of her bathroom. She was sick for days afterward. She vomited the blood that was brought to her and felt her cravings get worse because she was unable to keep it down. McArthur came to visit her during this time, presumably because her deliveryman had noticed she was looking unwell.

“Many try animal blood,” he said casually. She was curled up on her bed, only halfway clothed. She would have yelled at him to get out if she could have summoned up the energy for it. “It would simplify things enormously if it were possible, but alas, it is not. We’re not so monstrous that we would drink human blood for no reason.”

“It wasn’t that,” Julia said weakly. “I felt … constrained. A pint of blood every day? I kept wondering what would happen if one day the delivery didn’t come. It felt like you were trying to control me, to use the blood as a leash. I needed to know if I had a choice.”

“Ah,” said MacArthur. He patted her shoulder in a paternal way and gave her a pitying look. “You have not yet come to the realization that our fates are intertwined,” he said. “It takes time to see that we are all in this together. The vampires you see in the media are much more solitary, but of course that’s not an option for us. You will learn.”

“You could have told me,” said Julia. She coughed and swallowed down a clot of blood that had risen into her throat. “Told me it wouldn’t work.”

“Did you think that we drank human blood for fun?” asked MacArthur. From anyone else this would have been sarcastic and demeaning, but from MacArthur it came off as honest curiosity. “There is a significant amount of work involved in our operations which would be removed entirely if we could simply go to the butchers or purchase slaughterhouses of our own. We’ve tried all manner of blood throughout the years, from pigs to primates. There is no substitute for human blood, and it must be whole blood.”

“If I had known,” said Julia, “I would never have tried it myself.”

“Perhaps,” said MacArthur. He ran his fingers through his hair and gazed at the wall. “You see, I think you’re rather clever; that’s why I picked you, naturally. I think that it occurred to you that human blood is far more costly than animal blood, but you wondered whether we were lying to you for our own ends.” He shook his head. “‘What if they’ve been giving me animal blood?’, you wondered. Giving you more information wouldn’t have convinced you. You would simply have let the seed of doubt grow. You would have thought that the truth was a lie. We would have ended up in the same place, with you laying sick in your bed. Such is the fate of the clever.”

Julia shook her head, but she could tell that he was unconvinced.

“I’ll let you rest,” said MacArthur. “You’ll recover in a few days time and then you can start doing some proper work. It was expected that you would need some time to adjust, there’s no cause for concern.”

“I already started,” said Julia. She pointed a shaky hand towards the papers on her table. “Before I tried the cow’s blood.”

“You have something so soon?” asked MacArthur. His brow furrowed and he walked out of the bedroom to the large table they’d furnished her with. He spent some time looking through what she’d typed up. His frown deepened as he went. Julia was grateful for the peace and quiet. If she’d still been human, she would likely have drifted off to sleep, but as a vampire that only happened in the daytime, and it was more like an extended bout of drowsiness than true sleep.

“This isn’t what we discussed,” said MacArthur. He sat back down on the bed and leafed through the papers he’d brought over, looking at them one by one.

“No,” said Julia. “You wanted the wrong thing. Sorry, the language would be better if I’d had more time, those are only early drafts. I don’t know who I should really be talking to aside from you, but you said that the oldest of them have been around for more than a millenia.” Her stomach rumbled slightly and she felt the coppery taste in her mouth, but luckily nothing came up.

“The wrong thing?” asked MacArthur.

“You wanted to hide,” said Julia. “You wanted to cloak yourself and erase the evidence. But that was never going to work. Maybe if we were working from a blank slate, but we’re not. People already know about vampires. We can’t make everyone forget about vampirism and I doubt that we would want to even if we could.”

“Explain,” said MacArthur. Some of his gentle quality had left him, but Julia could tell that he was interested. She wished that she could have a week to recover so she could give him a better presentation of her thoughts, but waiting a week would let him form his opinions in the interim. Absent her input, he might end up with the wrong opinions.

“There are aberrations, you said,” replied Julia. “A vampire can be a criminal, just like a human can. If they kill someone, a witness might report a man with fangs and blood running down his mouth. There might be puncture wounds found on the victim’s neck.”

“Precisely the sort of thing we wish to erase,” said MacArthur. He was still frowning.

“No,” said Julia. “It’s impossible to keep getting rid of the evidence like that. We tried it during the war, you know? There were certain things that the OWI wanted kept from the public, but it never worked. There were too many pieces to keep track of, too many people that might see through the veil. It was always better to get out ahead of the news.”

“We will not reveal ourselves,” said MacArthur. “The topic has come up time and again among the elders, and it has always been judged as being too dangerous.”

“They’re conservatives,” said Julia with a nod of her head that her nausea made her instantly regret. “But that’s not what I mean. I’m not talking about being forthright, I’m talking about using information to our advantage. If all the signs of a vampire are there, then fine; it was a vampire. But of course vampires aren’t real, so it was a person who had a psychotic break and thought that he was a vampire. We give part of the truth so that the lie is more powerful.”

MacArthur returned to looking at Julia’s half-finished ideas. He was silent for a long while. “I will speak with the council about this,” he eventually said. “Or perhaps you can stand before them the next time they meet.”

 

* * *

 

The council had been less terrifying than Julia imagined. She had only spoken with five of the eleven members, as the rest were in other parts of the world, but the elder vampires seemed to be nothing more than ordinary people, though they were obviously rich and important. It would have been possible to mistake them for simple old-money millionaires, if she hadn’t known what they truly were. Giving the speech had made Julia nervous, and she’d found their stares intimidating, but they had been polite with their questions. A few of them must have been more than a thousand years old, but they didn’t act like it. Julia had no idea what a thousand year old vampire was supposed to sound like, but whatever it was, they weren’t it.

She didn’t hear anything back for three weeks. Then all at once MacArthur was calling her on the phone and asking how quickly she could get everything ready.

She was given an enormous amount of liberty, along with a sizeable account to draw money from. The weeks turned into months as she drew up and implemented new campaigns. The myth of the vampire grew, fragmented, and flourished; it seemed like no two authors could agree on what a vampire’s exact powers were. That was largely by Julia’s design. She operated mostly through the phone, especially after the first year the fitful not-quite-sleep during daytime passed and she was simply awake all the time. Save for the blacked-out windows, she could have been any advertising executive in the world, with considerably more leeway.

On her second Halloween as a vampire, she walked through the streets of the city and looked at all the men and women wearing fangs and capes. The fangs were made of wax and affixed on top of the teeth. It was a simple costume. You needed little more than a drop of fake blood and those bits of wax to pull it off, with the cape being optional. As a result, the streets were lousy with those pseudo-vampires. Julia’s tongue went to her filed down incisors every time she saw one of them. She had written an article on easy costume ideas that ran in The Saturday Evening Post. She had also arranged for the manufacture of the small “vampire kits” which were wrapped in cellophane and sold in every corner drugstore in America.

Julia affixed the wax caps to her teeth and strolled among the masses, feeling a faint marvel at what her campaign had accomplished.

 

* * *

 

MacArthur came to visit in her fifth year.

“You’ve been an unqualified success,” he said with a smile. He sat at her kitchen table, nursing a cup of bitter coffee. He looked exactly the same as he had when met her in the diner. Vampires didn’t age. It should have been one of the easier things to believe, but Julia still found herself surprised.

“I’m glad to hear it,” said Julia. She itched to ask MacArthur to put a coaster beneath his cup, but held back. She wasn’t around people much; almost all of her work was done by telephone, or through letters. It was a handicap, but making up explanations for why you could only meet at night would have been exhausting. Most days, she saw the vampire who delivered her blood and no one else.

“Spontaneous human combustion was a masterstroke,” said MacArthur. “It explains away quite a few things that would otherwise incriminate us.”

Julia shrugged. “It’s replacing one mystery with a different one,” she said. “It’s a tool to make people look in the wrong direction. Muddying the waters, as you said so long ago. That was the point, wasn’t it?”

“Of course,” nodded MacArthur.

“You’re here for a reason,” said Julia. “You’re … something of a crisis management expert within the Corporation.”

“The Corporation?” asked MacArthur with a bemused smile.

“It’s how I think of it,” Julia replied. She folded her arms across her chest. “Last time we saw each other was two years ago, when you needed to cover for a mass murder in the Bronx.” She had crafted a story about a new sort of drug, a hallucinogen which made people act out in violent and gruesome ways. The papers had parroted her explanation, through some mechanism that MacArthur controlled. It was one of those cases where a straight cover was the better option. “I don’t think I’ve done anything wrong, but you’re not acting like this is a crisis, so … have I done something wrong?”

“No,” said MacArthur, “Of course not. I’m here on business. This matter is important enough that I thought a personal touch was needed.”

Julia raised an eyebrow and waited.

“We want a plan for going public,” said MacArthur.

“Public?” asked Julia. “You mean telling everyone?” She frowned. “Everyone?” she repeated. But of course that was the nature of a secret, you couldn’t only tell some people, because they would spread it. The collective of vampires only managed to exist in the shadows because they all shared some joint future. Even that seemed tenuous sometimes. She was sent files from time to time, tales of burnt out vampires caught in the sun or maniac killers on the loose. On such occasions she wondered at the fact that the vampires had never been caught.

“The plans have yet to reach quickening,” said MacArthur. “There is some doubt that this masquerade will be able to continue in perpetuity. It might be better to unmask ourselves than to have someone else do it.”

“We’d need a modular approach,” said Julia. “I’ve given it some thought. We would want to paint ourselves as upstanding citizens and roll the truth out slowly. It wouldn’t be vampirism, of course, we’d have some bland name for it. Hematophagy. The changes in physiology would be the biggest stumbling block, that and the truth of what was done prior to the ... the reform.” There had been precious little information shared with Julia about what secrets lay in the past. If the oldest vampires really were millenia old, it was virtually certain that they were killers of the highest order. A vampire needed a pint of blood every day. That meant a murder every ten days, at a minimum, unless people could be bled once a month. The earliest vampires had accomplished it, somehow, but the Julia didn’t see any way that history would show it to have been clean and pretty.

“We wouldn’t reveal ourselves in full,” said MacArthur, as though echoing her thoughts. “Of course your opinion is quite valuable, and would be taken into consideration by our, ah, chief executives, if that’s what you would call them.”

“I’ll work on a proposal,” said Julia. “Is there a timeline for this reveal?”

“It’s been talked about for decades,” said MacArthur with a smile. “Centuries, truth be told. This is nothing we’ll be moving forward with for years to come. The elders -- the executives of our Corporation,” he smiled with a twinkle in his eye, “They want a plan, but won’t commit to using one until they’ve seen it. They’re quite conservative, as you know. They’d like two plans, as I understand it. The first would be for if we choose to reveal ourselves. The second would be for if revelation is thrust upon us.”

“Yes,” replied Julia. “A modular approach …” Her tongue touched the back of her teeth, just by instinct. “I’ll work on it.”

In the weeks that followed, Julia tried to map out a course for vampire kind. It seemed insane that she was being trusted with something like this, but if the executives of the Corporation were literally thousands of years old, it made some sense that thinking in terms of mass media wouldn’t come naturally to them.

She handed in her proposals in the fall of ‘51. She waited on pins and needles for two weeks, then six, until eventually it became clear that whoever was in charge of these decisions wasn’t going to do anything quickly. She kept her own copy of the plan and made a few revisions to it, hoping that she would be able to make quick alterations that would satisfy any objections.

Twenty years passed without a response.

 

* * *

 

In the summer of ‘69, Julia got a boyfriend.

It happened quite by accident. She had been at a bookstore, leafing through all of the vampire novels, trying to get a sense of the trends. It was always difficult to do this sort of research in the summer, given that the sun set so late, but as the years had passed, stores began staying open later and later. It was possible to slip into a bookstore in the hour or two before they closed and get a feel for the books as they existed in the real world. The numbers from the publishing houses told their own stories of course, but Julia still saw a value in taking a step back from the big picture to see how life was being lived.

“What’s your favorite kind of vampire?”

Julia turned and saw a smiling man with a cheerful grin. He had rosy cheeks and smile lines, both of which were attractive on him. Round glasses sat on a crooked nose, and Julia wondered whether he was consciously trying to imitate John Lennon.

“Sorry, I just saw you standing there, and there seemed to be a theme to your selections,” said the man. His smiled faltered somewhat. “I’m Eric.”

“I … I have a medical condition,” said Julia. Her interactions with people were mostly through fax or letter, or red scrawling in the margins of some ad copy or a screenplay. It was rare that she had any face-to-face time, save for when she needed to make a purchase, and then it was reduced down to a few perfunctory phrases exchanged at the checkout.

“A medical condition?” asked Eric. He had a pleasant, slightly puzzled look on his face. “Anything that I should be worried about standing next to you?”

“No,” said Julia. “No, sorry, it’s,” she held up the book, which featured a pale white vampire, fangs and all, and a woman with a ripped bodice, “It’s Smith-Welkins disease.” She slowly found her voice. “Characterized by an extreme photosensitivity, and so, you see.”

“You’re a vampire?” asked Eric. He was still smiling. His eyes were bright and searching.

Julia laughed, a little too high and loud. “In a manner of speaking,” she said.

“So what’s your favorite kind of vampire story?” asked Eric.

Julia set the book back on the shelf. “I don’t know,” she said. “There are so many to choose from.”

“But you read a lot of vampire fiction?” asked Eric.

“Enough of it,” said Julia. “Truth be told, I’m getting bored. But to answer your question, if I had to choose … I don’t like the sexualized ones.” She frowned, and placed a finger against the cover of the book she’d been holding. It was easy enough to talk about work. “I don’t like the dark and tragic vampires, the ones that are frail in some way, even though they’re strong. It’s too much of a fantasy. People like the danger of it, but of course there’s no danger in the romance. A woman falls into a vampire’s clutches, bares her neck to him, he tears at her clothes … and then they have sex.” She looked to Eric. She would have been blushing if she were still able to. “It never ends with domestic violence, or a rape, or any of the things you’d expect from the premise. It’s unreal.”

“But they’re vampires,” said Eric. He still had his ready, winning smile. “Of course they’re not real.”

“Oh, but you know what I mean,” said Julia. This was familiar territory. She’d written a letter to the editor on this subject just a few weeks ago. Her connections ensured that it was going to be published. “There needs to be a sense of reality underpinning the unreal. Our buxom heroine goes into an abandoned house, after having heard that dogs have been disappearing in the area. She finds a man with blood around his mouth in one of the empty rooms. Her natural reaction should be to run away, or to call the police. She should think that he was homeless and deranged. But no, instead the story has her sit down next to him and listen as he spins a tale. No real person would do that, without being deranged herself.” She tapped the book again and frowned.

“Is that the plot of that one?” asked Eric.

“No,” said Julia. “But others, yes. And there are worse, more implausible plots. Vampires as billionaire playboys, vampires as mysterious loners only looking for someone to love them. Muscular vampires, brutishly strong. It’s always halfway to being a rape fantasy.”

Eric coughed slightly, and Julia turned away.

“But that wasn’t your question,” said Julia. “What I like are vampire hunters.”

“Oh?” asked Eric. “Like Van Helsing?” He looked through the row upon row of vampire novels that lined this particular section of shelving. “Somewhat in short supply, I would say.”

“True. That’s what I like though,” said Julia. “I like real danger. A lone man with a stake, up against impossible odds. Someone who comes out winning.”

“A bit of self-loathing?” asked Eric with a laugh.

Julia smiled, but it didn’t last long.

She’d expected Eric to turn away from her, but they kept talking. Julia found herself enjoying his company. She had no friends. MacArthur’s visits were infrequent, and then only when he needed something from her. She occasionally spoke with one of the vampires that delivered her pint of blood -- now in a hermetically sealed plastic pouch instead of a bottle -- but that wasn’t a real friendship of any sort, and the pleasantries didn’t last long. Julia had relationships through work, but they were all professional in nature, and almost always took place over fax, phone, or mail.

When the bookstore began to close, Eric sheepishly asked for her number, and Julia, to her faint surprise, gave it to him.

 

* * *

 

 

“It seems a shame to black out your windows,” said Eric. He was peering at them as though he would be able to see the park that lay beyond them. “Or rather, it seems a shame to pay for an apartment with a view when you’re not going to make use of that view.”

“I can open them at night,” said Julia. “Though I rarely do.” This was something of an overstatement. She had opened the windows once, in 1953.

“I don’t mean to pry, but how do you afford this space?” asked Eric. “We’ve known each other for a few weeks now, and I still don’t have any idea what it is that you do for a living.”

“I’m in advertising,” said Julia. “Something of an executive, to tell the truth.”

Eric looked mildly alarmed. He’d confessed to being a college professor of literature on their second date. “Where?” he asked.

“Ah,” said Julia. “Well now you are prying.” She’d grown more comfortable with him in the time they spent together, but she wasn’t entirely sure that this relationship was something MacArthur would have given his blessing to.

“Sorry,” said Eric. “I know you don’t like to talk about work. I mean, you’ve never said as much, but I figured it out on my own. Whenever I talk about teaching, you never respond with your own anecdotes. I am curious though. I get the sense that your interest in vampires isn’t purely pleasurable.” He gestured to the shelves of material that Julia had accumulated. There were hundreds of books, not just on vampires, but mythology, artwork, and human history. She had taken everything incriminating and put it in the safe in her bedroom, but her work had consumed so much of her life that it wouldn’t have been impossible to hide it all without stripping the apartment bare, and that would have been more suspicious than leaving most things where they were.

“I’m something of an expert in vampires,” said Julia. “Or rather, an expert in the stories that people tell about vampires.”

“Is there a market for that?” asked Eric. He dragged his finger across the spines of the books. “Who pays for a vampire expert?”

Julia shrugged. “It’s complicated.”

“Complicated,” Eric repeated. There had been a few times in their relationship so far when she’d said something cryptic, and Eric’s response had always been to repeat it back as though he was faintly amused, or sharing a joke with her.

“Complicated,” said Julia. She tried to make her tone firm and final, but she knew that Eric would look wounded if she was harsh with him. That meant she wasn’t able to put the full force of her will behind the word.

“So did the expertise in vampires come along because of your, ah, condition?” asked Eric.

“You could say that,” said Julia.

“May I ask an indelicate question?” asked Eric.

Julia frowned. “I had hoped that inviting you to see my place wouldn’t have been such an invitation to inquisition,” she said. “I knew it was too soon, but you kept asking. Eric, I’m sorry, but there are just some questions that are going to have to remain unanswered for now. You’re going to have to accept that I have good reasons for not being more open with you.” She paused. “As much as I do enjoy your company.”

“It’s really a very minor question,” said Eric. “More improper than probing.” He gave her a rosy-cheeked grin. “I only wanted to know how old you were.”

Julia frowned and turned slightly away from him. Vampires were incapable of crying, but she still felt the urge. Things had been going well with Eric, but she’d been a fool to think she would be able to make it work. In the pulp novels there was always a glamour to the mystery; she was finding glamour decidedly absent from their conversation.

“You see,” said Eric, either ignoring her distress or not noticing it at all, “I had originally thought that you were younger, maybe even young enough to be one of my students, but when I look at all these books, especially the more academic ones, I wonder how you would have had time to read them all. And surely knowing your age isn’t too much? I mean, I know where you live now, after all.”

“I’m twenty-three,” said Julia. That was how old she’d been when she was turned. The apartment made the lie somewhat improbable. There were too many books, as Eric had seen. He was supposed to believe that she was an advertising executive and twenty-three was rather young for the position. Her work could simply be a mystery to him though. She had come to the decision that they wouldn’t see each other again after this night.

“Twenty-three,” repeated Eric, like this was some private joke she had let him in on.

“This was a mistake,” said Julia.

“I find the oddity alluring,” said Eric, with his same gentle smile. “It’s like those vampires,” he continued, gesturing towards the bookshelves. “It’s the mystery that draws people in.”

“You have to leave,” said Julia.

Eric’s face twisted into a frown. “Call me when you’re in a better mood,” he said.

But of course she didn’t. She had gone as far with Eric as it was possible to go, and brought too much risk onto the both of them. Eric called her after a few weeks had passed, but only once or twice. Julia thought that would be the end of it, until he showed up at her apartment one night with five other men.

He presented her with a warrant and a badge that said United States Secret Service.

 

* * *

 

“We noticed the irregularities seven years ago,” Eric said. She had thought that all of his charm and gentleness would melt away from him now that he’d revealed himself, but his tone was light and conversational. He wore a grey suit with a blue tie that matched his eyes. She was fairly certain that she’d been transferred to the holding facility after dark on his say-so. He was, after all, familiar with her condition.

“You were never a professor,” said Julia.

“Let me finish,” said Eric. “We noticed the irregularities seven years ago. There were companies that were losing money on a consistent basis. There’s nothing illegal about that, strictly speaking, but the IRS brought it to our attention in a rare moment of interdepartmental cooperation. A company that bleeds money over a long enough time period is a sure sign of fraud or money laundering, so our interest should be fairly obvious.”

Julia stared at him. “This is about … money?”

“In the big picture, yes,” said Eric. “There’s something illegal going on. We don’t know what it is, exactly, but Interlake Iron, Robertshaw Controls, and Gould-National are all implicated. These are Fortune 500 companies we’re talking about. I’ll be honest with you, we have nothing that can stick against any of them. It’s all been by the books, maybe even suspiciously so. Profits are diverted in strange directions, but that’s not against the law. If a steel company wants to invest in blood transfusion technology at a rate that’s ill-advised, Uncle Sam says more power to them.”

“But I’m here,” said Julia.

The two biggest problems with her confinement were going to be a lack of blood and an overabundance of sunlight. Julia needed a single pint of blood every day before she would begin to feel the effects of going without. She had tested her resolve before and found that she could go three days before it became a solid, twisting craving like a piece of hard oak jammed in her brain. Once she was at that point, all other thoughts began to be pushed to the side, replaced by desperate, wanton need. After four days in this room, or a holding cell elsewhere in the facility, she would probably try to kill someone and almost certainly succeed. There was little question that she was strong enough to tear past all of their defenses and escape, but that would be tantamount to firing the opening salvo in a human-vampire war.

Sunlight was the other problem. They had been nice to her by taking her in under cover of darkness, but if they released her into daylight, or even just put her in a cell with a window and nowhere to hide, the jig would be up.

“But you’re here,” said Eric, repeating her line back to her like he was quoting from a comedy. He grinned. Despite everything, it was still charming. “We don’t have anything on those companies, but we know enough to know that something is going on, something very much of interest to the United States of America. That’s the big picture. The small picture, the one that could pretty much fit within this room, is that we know quite a bit about you. Identity theft is just the start of it. They found an empty plastic sack with traces of human blood in your apartment. It paints a very vivid picture, don’t you think?”

“I want to speak with my lawyer,” said Julia.

“You think you’re a vampire,” said Eric. “I don’t care about that. I care about the millions of dollars that are being moved around, money that you’re a minor beneficiary of.”

Julia swallowed. “I said I want to speak with my lawyer.”

 

* * *

 

MacArthur drove in silence, and Julia stared straight ahead. It had taken thirty minutes from when she’d made the phone call to when she was escorted from the building. It was still dark out.

“It was our fault,” said MacArthur. “It wasn’t just sloppiness, it was a failure to adapt to the changing shape of the world. There are far more files moving around now than there were a hundred years ago. The bureaucracy has expanded so aggressively that it’s more difficult to hide than it once was. We’ll be changing the protocols, of course -- new identities every ten years.”

“I let him into my house,” said Julia. “We dated.”

“He was onto us far before that,” said MacArthur. “That’s how you ended up dating in the first place. We’re lucky, in a way, that this was a lone man going out on a limb. It will be easier to deal with, since he doesn’t have much backing within the agency. Most likely he had no idea who he was dealing with.”

“We’re exposed,” said Julia. “He knows that we’re vampires.”

“You said that he thinks we’re deluded about being vampires,” said MacArthur. “He thought the proposition was so insane that he didn’t bother to test it. Exactly as you predicted twenty-five years ago.”

“We need to dust off the plan for going public,” said Julia. “I’ve kept it up-to-date, but I’ve been the only one looking at it, the Corporation is going to need to give input, and of course I’d need their buy-in.”

“Calm down,” said MacArthur. “This is far from being the first bump in the road of our millennial existence. You will vanish from the face of the earth and be given a new identity, one that’s more ironclad. The money will be moved around and the current associations buried.”

Julia shook her head. “Eric knows that I was involved with crafting the vampire narrative. He’ll only need to look behind the scenes to find me again.”

“You’re going to cease work for now,” said MacArthur. “We’ll hide you for a decade or so. You can pick up new skills during that time and be ready to come out when the coast is clear.”

“Eric won’t stop that easily,” said Julia. “Especially if he’s out on a limb. He’ll have something to prove. He’ll go looking.”

“Eric isn’t long for this world,” said MacArthur.

Julia stared out at the city as it went by. They were driving out to the compound where they’d filed down her fangs. Julia hadn’t been there since shortly after she’d been turned. She tried to imagine how they would kill Eric, but it all seemed unreal in her mind’s eye. Vampires were strong and fast, and more or less immune to bullets, though she’d never tested that herself. It would be easy enough to murder Eric in the middle of the night. The issue would be making it look innocuous. A staged suicide perhaps. Or a poisoning. Or maybe Eric would simply disappear.

 

* * *

 

Two years passed. Julia was relocated to New York City. All of her things were moved without her having to lift a finger. She was given a new identity, Persephone Lancaster, and a job working as a secretary to a wealthy man. She was unsure whether her employer actually existed; she was never required to do any work and had never been given an introduction. She received her usual pint of blood every day, though now word had come down that she was to store the empty bags in her safe. Early on, she spent her nights exploring the city and her days reading whatever caught her fancy. After the first month, she took up painting and spent most of her time inside.

MacArthur came to her apartment one day, wringing his hands. “We need to get moving on the plan for public exposure.”

“I’m going back to work?” asked Julia.

“The Secret Service is after us,” said MacArthur. “Like a dog with a bone. Your boyfriend had his roots in deeper than we’d thought.” He was practically snarling. Julia had never seen so much emotion from the man. “We need to go public, within the next year, possibly sooner.”

“I -- I don’t know,” said Julia. “We were supposed to do it slowly, speak with a few likely people in power … a year is very little time.”

“Needs must,” said MacArthur. His mouth was a firm line. “Have a proposal within the next two days.”

“Two days?” asked Julia.

“Two days,” repeated MacArthur. “Our existence is at stake.”

Julia was thankful that she no longer needed sleep, because the next two days were spent brushing off old plans and making adjustments to them. The proposal ran to some eighty pages. The condensed version covered a single sheet of paper. She had been in enough meetings to know that people didn’t have the patience for eighty pages.

She made the presentation in front of the full council, all eleven members.

 

* * *

 

Julia cleared her throat. She had practiced at her kitchen table, with eleven glasses of water that she could look at one by one. She would have been more comfortable sending the report to them as a paper and dealing with their letters of response, but MacArthur had insisted on the need for her to present it herself.

“The need to go public is clear. If we take no action of our own, we will be unmasked. It is far better for this to happen on our own terms. The issue of going public is one of perception, both from the organizations which might wish to do us harm, and from the realm of public opinion, which largely serves to drive those organizations.” This was met with blank stares. They already knew this, but Julia hadn’t felt right without an introduction.

“Our primary aim is the manipulation of the public. This does not have to be underhanded in any way. We are what we are and that is not inherently objectionable. There are a great many novels and films which portray vampires as tragic creatures. We have already laid out a long trail of research papers which paint the, ah, condition as a medical one, which we hope will garner sympathy. The plan is then divided into a number of parts, each of which will have to be given a great deal of attention.” Again, the room was silent. There wasn’t even the sound of breathing to cut through the stillness.

“The first step will come before the public reveal,” said Julia. “We will find a number of respectable people who might be amenable to our condition and invite them to join us.”

“You speak of induction,” said a female vampire. She was dressed as conservatively as possible while still being fashionable. She had a slight lilt to her voice that suggested something of Ireland, but the elder vampires tended to speak impeccable English. A command of languages and the ability to appropriate accents were both invaluable skills for a vampire who needed to remain in hiding for hundreds of years.

“Induction,” said Julia. She was momentarily put off her footing by the question. “Yes, we can call it induction. We would select for those people who might have an interest in the benefits that our condition can offer, those that are well-liked by the general public, excellent speakers, and so on. They would become our allies. We could put a human face on the transition. The sooner this is done, the better, but obviously there will be a process involved in vetting people. I think it’s clear that having the Rolling Stones on the cover of Time magazine with their fangs out would do wonders for us.”

“Whose bloodlines do you propose these inductees would enter into?” asked a stocky vampire with a wide nose. His incisors hadn’t been filed down as sharply as every else's. They gave the suggestion of small fangs, though you would miss it if you weren’t on the lookout for them.

Julia stopped short of saying that the bloodlines didn’t matter. She was only vaguely aware of the bloodlines themselves. Each of these eleven vampires sat at the top of one of them, and shared a connection to their progeny via the affliction of vampirism. Julia had never seen true numbers, if any existed, but killing any one of these eleven would result in a significant fraction of the vampiric population turning to ash. She didn’t have any idea which bloodline she belonged to.

“That is a question for the council to decide,” said Julia, which seemed to be the most diplomatic solution to the issue. She had always known that she was disconnected from the wider world of vampires, but she had never before realized to just what extent.

“Continue,” said a tall vampire with a widow’s peak. Of the lot of them, he was the one that most closely resembled the stock vampire from which most of the modern stories took their inspiration.

“As I was saying,” said Julia. “Turning a number of popular or important people into vampires comes early on. We would need to have that accomplished prior to everything else we would need to do. The first proper step is revealing our existence to the governments of the world. I believe the Soviet Union and the United States would have to come first. They have the largest security apparatuses. Even if my contacts in the intelligence services have gone stale, I have to believe that if we went public elsewhere, word from other countries would reach these shores in a hurry, whether those allied countries wanted it to or not. I wasn’t able to get a good picture of where the vampire populations are located, but obviously we’ll want to focus on those places where the concentrations are heaviest.”

“You propose speaking to the leaders personally,” said the stocky vampire. He shifted in his seat and looked to her.

“Not directly, no,” said Julia. “We can prepare a dossier on ourselves, a list of our strengths and weaknesses, and deliver it to the right government employee, someone carefully selected to be an advocate for us. If we have a year, we can find one. Eventually the news will reach the top, and they will have meetings, much like this one.”

“Human meetings to decide our fate,” said a statuesque woman with hair so blonde it was practically white. The rest of the vampires nodded along.

“If they ever learn of us, they will have those meetings,” said Julia. “What we want is for them to have those meetings with as open a mind as possible.”

The rest of the presentation went quickly, without major hiccups, but Julia could see that there were hesitations. Some of them were internal, bloodline politics that were far beyond her understanding and preparations. Some of them were external. The elders did not like the idea of being at the mercy of the humans, even if that was a necessary part of engaging in dialogue with the other side. Julia didn’t imagine that she felt the gulf between their species as keenly as them, but she had made her presentation with that in mind.

If she had been human, she was sure that her hands would have been shaking as she left the room, but she was now a creature with more natural grace and composure than that. All in all, it could have gone worse. It wasn’t like the vampires had any other options.

 

* * *

 

“War,” said MacArthur. “We’re going to war.”

“War?” asked Julia. “But … we number in the hundreds, if that. We can’t go to war.”

The idea was absurd on the face of it. Vampires were strong and fast, capable of shrugging off gunfire, but they burned down to ash in the sunlight. Perhaps their weaknesses could be hidden for a time, but eventually someone would make the connection and a whole host of clever ideas would be pulled from the very vampire novels that Julia had helped to put on the shelves. It turned out that a certain class of people enjoyed the idea of wooden bullets piercing straight through vampire flesh like a small, finely sharpened stake. She might have kept books like that from being published if she had ever had that much weight to throw around, or if she’d ever thought it would matter. Now it was possible fiction would turn into fact.

The sheer numbers were what took the idea of war from bad to worse. Even if every vampire managed to kill a thousand humans, they would lose. Julia paused as a thought clicked into place. Her own plan had included turning humans into vampires, bringing people across the divide in order to solidify a public relations front. The elder vampire had called it induction, but now a new light was cast on the phrase. If it came to war, the vampires could simply make more of themselves, weak newborn vampires who could nonetheless hold their own against at least a squad of men. It wouldn’t even matter whether the newborns consented to the change. They would have every reason to join the side of the vampires, not just for the supply of blood, but because their very lives depended on the trunk of the tree of descendents remaining intact.

“They might be able to win,” breathed Julia. “If it really came down to it … they might be able to win.”

“We might,” MacArthur corrected. “The plans for war-making are underway as we speak.”

“There are too many weaknesses to shore up,” said Julia. “We won’t be able to walk among them, not when they’re looking for us, which means that they’ll hunt us in the daytime, and --”

“This is not the problem that you need to solve,” said MacArthur. “There are those of us who have made study of war for centuries.”

“The problem I need to solve?” asked Julia with a pause. Understanding dawned on her. “Of course, how foolish could I be, to think that I would have been told anything if there wasn’t some use for me.”

“You are in this as much as any of us,” said MacArthur. His voice was firm and the muscles of his neck were taut. “If a vampire dies, their entire branch of progeny dies with them. That is the source of our unity. It is our eternal strength. You will do the work because you are motivated by self-interest. There is no way for you to opt out of this, not if you value your own life.”

“What do you want from me then?” asked Julia.

“Propaganda,” said MacArthur. “The same as you did in the Office of War Information. We need to ensure that if we win, we can engineer a lasting peace. We’ll still need blood; it’s always been better for it to come from supplicants, people giving their vital fluids willingly. We’re still going public Julia, it’s just the terms that have changed. You prepared for a catastrophic reveal, you planned the things that would be said if someone ripped the mask off, you just need to change it so that we come out ahead when we make our own dramatic entrance.”

“We’ll step on stage following a tide of blood and gore,” said Julia. Her stomach sank.

“Yes,” said MacArthur. “It’s not going to be an easy job, but I believe in you.”

 

* * *

 

Julia packed her suitcase that night. She would be traveling light, with only a few spare dresses. She didn’t sweat anymore, nor did her skin produce oil, so there was little need to change clothes with regularity unless she was worried about being tracked. She was worried about being tracked, but she could pick up some more clothing along the way. Varied styles of dress would make it harder for anyone to pick up the trail.

Julia purchased thick black garbage bags from an all-night supermarket, along with several rolls of tape. Sunlight would be the second biggest problem she would face out in the world on her own. Being able to turn any room into a blackout room would be essential, given that she would have to hole up for long periods of time while the day passed. She briefly considered the sewers, but her vision hadn’t substantially improved in the process of becoming a vampire, which meant that the darkness would still inhibit her, to say nothing of the smell.

The biggest problem was, naturally, the question of blood. A vampire needed a pint a day, every day, for the rest of her eternal life. A person could safely donate blood once every fifty-six days, which meant that if you wanted to keep using the same small group of people, you would need fifty-six in total, though it was possible to use as few as forty if you were fine with adverse effects in the long run. The human body contained ten pints of blood, on average, which meant that if you could completely drain a person, you would need to kill someone every ten days.

Julia had no idea what to do about the blood problem. She was going to be on the run from the vampires and, at the same time, needed to stay concealed from the police. Attempting to steal blood from strangers would very quickly raise some eyebrows, even if she could manage to do it without being seen. If multiple people reported the theft of their very blood, it would almost certainly make the news. Julia knew that as well as anyone; she had participated in the cover-ups of a number of rogue vampire attacks.

Killing was more practical, all things considered. The vast majority of murders happened between two people who knew each other, which meant that when someone went missing or was found dead, the first place the police started looking was their co-workers, relatives, and friends. Anonymous murders were barely ever solved, so long as there was at least some token attempt to clean up the crime scene. Julia’s fingerprints hadn’t been taken when she was brought in by the police, which meant that they didn’t exist in any books at any police station or governmental body for cross-reference. She was relatively non-descript as well, so any eyewitnesses would be unlikely to pinpoint her.

Once her bags were packed, she paid for a cab with cash and took off to the west, heading inland. She was short on plans. Stuffed inside her suitcase were ten pints of blood, which were all she’d been able to stockpile. Leaving the vampires had been a long time coming. That stockpile had been sitting in her refrigerator for the better part of a year. It bought her an extra ten days until she would have to kill or find someone to feed from.

The war would have to happen without her. If the vampires lost, Julia would die with them. If they won, she would try to find some place in the new world order, drinking blood and hiding from them. She had no idea what penalty there would be for leaving, if they ever found her, but she didn’t want to find out.

The cab dropped her off at a hotel in the middle of Pennsylvania. She spoke with the front desk only briefly, and again, paid in cash. Once she had found her room, she put a Do Not Disturb hanger on the door and began putting up the trash bags to black out the window. Once that was completed, she went out into the parking lot to make sure that nothing looked suspect from the outside. She had taped the bags up so that they pressed the curtains against the window, but the effect wasn’t noticeable. Julia went back inside, locked the door to her room, and began drinking from her bag of blood, going as quickly as she could so that the taste would have as little time as possible to rest on her tongue. After that, she tried to figure out a workable plan.

There was a knock on her door at just after daybreak. Julia frowned at the door and walked over to look through the peephole. She saw a gun pointed at her through the door. Holding it was Eric.

“I just want to talk,” said Eric.

Julia would have run from him too, if she could have. He had waited until daybreak though, which meant that there was nowhere for her to run to. She would burn in the sunlight, even if she could get into a car. She could cover herself completely, but then she wouldn’t be able to drive. A part of her wanted to kill every person in the hotel and hide there until nightfall, but she suspected that was the vampire in her.

“I know you’re in there,” said Eric. “Open the door. The gun is for my protection, not yours. The bullets are made of wood, by the way. If you don’t let me in, I’m going to have to break the window open from the outside, and neither of us wants that.”

Julia clenched her hand on the door knob so hard that she left an impression. She twisted it slowly and opened the door for him. He slipped in quickly, keeping his gun trained on her.

“You know,” said Eric. “This would have gone a lot easier for everyone if you had just turned state’s evidence in the first place.”

“You’re supposed to be dead,” said Julia. She couldn’t help but feel relieved that he wasn’t, even given the circumstances.

“Am I?” asked Eric. “Who told you that?” Julia was silent. “Well I’m sorry to disappoint.” He still had that winning grin. “Now, the fact that you’re here and unaccompanied seems to mean that your allegiance has switched, so I was wondering whether you’d be willing to make a deal.”

“How did you find me?” asked Julia. She’s been careful when she ran, careful not to leave a trail behind her.

“We had you pegged a month after the move to New York. We’ve been staking you out for quite some time, no pun intended.” Eric chuckled, but Julia didn’t so much as crack a smile. “When we saw you leaving your house with luggage, we followed the cab.”

Julia stared at him. Something was crumpling up inside her. Her hope of freedom had escaped her, and she was only just now realizing that they had gone.

“I have backup,” said Eric. “If you kill me, they’ll kill you, and neither of us has an interest in you dying. What we need from you is information. Who are the head vampires, where do they congregate, which companies do we need to freeze the assets of, that sort of thing. Now, I’m not going to hurt you unless you start moving too fast. If you need me to, I’ll set the gun down, okay?”

“You were supposed to be dead,” said Julia. She’d said it already, but that was what was going through her head.

“I found you the first time by following the money,” said Eric. “You were supposed to be a nobody, just a woman with an odd job that large companies were indirectly paying for and a checkered past that I could use against you. When they snatched you out of custody that quickly though … I started digging deeper. Then I started getting paranoid. I took amphetamines to keep myself from sleeping and sure enough, a pair of men dressed all in black silently opened my triply-locked door.”

“But you had wooden bullets,” said Julia. She tried to imagine the firefight, the speed of the vampires as they moved and the crack of the bullets. She had been in his apartment. His life had been destroyed because of her.

“No, actually,” said Eric. “The two men were just men. Well, men, but also criminals. They’d been hired by a third party. Top rate too, I have to say, except for the fact that I was prepared for them. If it had been a vampire, I would have experienced a far less favorable outcome. I’m not going to bore you with what followed, but I think it would suffice to say that the United States government came out on top in that exchange. Now, let’s get down to brass tacks. I expect you’ll want some level of protection and compensation. I can offer both.”

Julia shook her head. “I don’t want to be anyone’s thrall. I just want … I don’t know.”

“Blood,” said Eric. “A pint a day? We know that just based on what we’ve found rifling through abandoned safehouses. You’ll be our first convert, we’ll treat you nicely.”

“How much do you know?” asked Julia.

“Enough,” replied Eric. “We’ve tapped some phones. We know there’s some kind of hierarchy of vampires. We know you burn in sunlight. We know you need blood to live. I saw one of you in Washington a week ago. He broke his cover when one of our agents got too close, snapped the man’s neck like a twig, then went off running as fast as a Ferrari. We know they’re rich and powerful. Everything else we’ll uncover with time, unless you want to tell me now. We’ve got quite a long time until nightfall.” He lowered the gun and slipped it into a hip holster. “Come on Julia.”

Oblivion waited at the end of that path. She would tell him everything, and they would make war against the vampires. When the wrong one died, she would turn to ash, her life snuffed out completely. When she ran away, she had thought that she was willing to accept death, but now, faced with this future, she could see that she was only deluding herself. She hadn’t wanted to die at the age of twenty-three, with a good sixty years in her future. She wanted to die even less now, when she had all of eternity.

“You can provide me with blood and shelter,” said Julia.

“We can provide you with blood and shelter,” replied Eric. The words were like an echo, said in his soothing voice.

“I need something else from you,” said Julia. “No one can die. You have to bring them all in alive.”

“Alive?” asked Eric. “Or undead?”

“This isn’t a joke,” said Julia.

“No,” said Eric. “This is serious vampire business. Alright, we’ll do our best to make a live capture whenever possible. With your help in finding their locations, I don’t think we’ll have too much trouble. After all, we just need to wait until daylight and surround them.”

The room’s phone rang. The both looked at it.

“Answer it,” said Eric. He drew his gun again, but didn’t point it at her. “They know you’re here.”

Julia walked over to the phone and raised it to her ear.

“Hello?” she asked.

“Julia, it’s a pleasure to speak with you, as always.” She was only mildly surprised to hear MacArthur’s calm and collected voice from the other end of the line. “Is anyone listening in on our conversation?”

“No,” replied Julia. She had no doubt that Eric would have liked to, but he seemed to know that if he got close enough to share the speaker, she would have no trouble dispatching him. For all his bluster and good cheer, he didn’t trust her.

“But there is someone in the room with you, is there not?” asked MacArthur.

“Yes,” replied Julia.

What’s he saying, mouthed Eric. Julia shrugged and shook her head.

“I could express disappointment with you,” said MacArthur. “But our time is short. Kill everyone there with you as swiftly as possible. We’re sending a blackout van to your location, along with other support.”

“And why would I do what you say?” asked Julia. She stared at Eric, who had raised an eyebrow.

“When a vampire dies, his progeny die with him,” said MacArthur. His voice had lost its avuncular tone. “Do as I say, or I’m afraid drastic action would have to be taken. You were an asset. You might still be one.”

“Drastic action?” asked Julia. “The elders would kill one of their own to silence me? I doubt that.” This resulted in a questioning look from Eric.

“There is a vampire, chained up in a hole, fed blood every day to keep him alive, allowed no light nor movement. It is a matter of a single word to put a stake through his heart. He is your progenitor.” MacArthur’s words sent a cold terror through Julia’s spine, but his tone was sincere and apologetic. “Kill everyone there. We’ll have people to you within a half hour.”

“They must have a mole,” said Eric from across the room. “That’s the only way they’d know you were here. We tracked you, but there was no one behind us. Whatever they said to you, ignore it. Whatever they’re offering, we can double it. We can keep you safe. We can protect you.”

Julia set the phone back in its cradle.

“What did they offer you?” asked Eric.

If Julia has still been human, her hands would have been trembling. As soon as MacArthur had said it, she knew that it was true. They could kill her at any time, with no limit on their range. She had little doubt that the price of a pint of blood every day was one they would be willing to pay. They could do it now and she would crumble to dust. They could have done it when she went to jail, if they hadn’t been able to get her out. She could never betray them, not for long. MacArthur had told her, just after she’d turned, that it was more strength than weakness. She could see now that he had been hinting at the truth.

“Julia, I know that you’re not a bad person,” said Eric. His voice had gone soft and soothing, like he was talking to a wild animal. Her eyes flickered to his gun, which had changed position. He was pointing it at her again.

“I never questioned where the blood came from,” said Julia. “I never looked for the sins I knew I would find. There were deaths, so many deaths, and I helped make sure that no one would know the truth.”

“Please --” Eric began.

Vampires were stronger than humans. Vampires were also faster than humans. Julia wasn’t fast enough to dodge a bullet, but she was fast enough to move out of the way of the barrel of the gun, even as Eric moved to track her. She snatched something small and hard from the table next to her and flung it at him. As it flew through the air, some small part of her brain recognized it as an ashtray. The ashtray hit him square in the face before he could fire his gun. She darted toward him, pushing away the gun with one hand and punching him in the neck with the other. When he fell to the floor, she was on him in an instant, sinking her teeth into his neck and biting down on his flesh until it broke and let forth a gush of blood. His mouth was moving to scream, but no noises came out. As the seconds passed, he stopped struggling, stopped reaching for his fallen gun, and eventually lay still and lifeless.

Julia didn’t cry, because vampires couldn’t cry. She hadn’t meant to drink his blood until she was in the moment. She picked up his gun from the floor and tried to think about what was supposed to come after this. MacArthur had said that they would have people to her within the hour, but the gun had gone off, and Eric had said there were people outside. She waited, watching the closed door, pointing her gun at it. Her hands didn’t shake, because vampires didn’t suffer from nerves.

It was twenty minutes before there was a knock on her door. Julia had been afraid that someone was going to blow out the window and expose her to sunlight, or breach in through the door, but there had been nothing like that. Eric had said that he had backup, but it was entirely possible that was a lie. She crept to the door, placing the barrel of the gun against it, and looked through the peephole. A man in a navy blue suit and a brown briefcase was standing there with his jaw clenched so tight the muscles were showing.

“Julia?” he asked. His eyes briefly laid upon Eric’s corpse. “I was sent to collect you. We need to get going.”

 

* * *

 

Julia had cast her lot. The vampires had leverage over her, not just by controlling the supply of blood, but by having a stranglehold on her immortality. Her ill-conceived attempt at escape had lasted less than a day. She’d expected a visit from MacArthur, but none had come. Eric’s obituary mentioned only his work in the Secret Service, with nothing about the nature of his death. There had been a coverup, though she didn’t know whether it had been the vampires or the humans.

She was put to work, renewing the plans for after the war had been won. When they’d first met, MacArthur had said that propaganda wasn’t what they wanted, but now that was all that Julia found herself doing. She mocked up posters with vampires on them, proud and pale, square jaws and sterling blue eyes. She came up with slogans and iconography for the new vampire order, blacks and reds, both regal and stark. Her thoughts of running away had evaporated.

On a cool, crisp morning in autumn, the vampires took over the world.

 


End file.
